"V-ray is preparing to render, please wait... writing xml to disk"

Skatter General
1

VFS is having trouble during this stage with a simple skatter grass plane in my scene. The scene renders fine when i delete the skatter element. Can’t seem to figure it out. A link to the file is below.

Gym File

2

a little more testing on the above file. The grass was prepared using the “medium grass 01 Large” preset. it seem to give me some trouble. the object count was slightly lower than 200,000. Tried it again with same proxy but no preset this time. used view clipping feature and modest spacing, object count is about 22,000. That renders fine. Is it fair to say that i was pushing the limit with 200,000 plus objects? or is there a different reason VFS was hanging?

3
Is it fair to say that i was pushing the limit with 200,000 plus objects?
Vray's limit, yes... It is very slow to start the render when there are lots of objects, and there's nothing I can do about it on Skatter's side. Other render engines are much faster to start the render, Thea for example. Vray 3.0 is supposed to be much faster than Vray 2.0, but no one knows when it'll be released.

The render will start at some point, but it may take time.

4

I’ve experienced similar waiting times for vray to start the render however:

  • when using the grass from the skatter library in large amounts the waiting times before the render starts are extreme long and sketchup took more than my 32 gb of ram before the start. Once the render started it was very quick.

  • when using the grass from the meadow scene, the waiting times are way quicker, and the ram usage was normal, but the render itself took forever. (In the same scene, the skatter grass took 1,5 hour and the meadow grass took 15 hours!)

The meadow grass I’ve converted to sketchup components, and vray proxies, since I know vray handles ram better.

Could it be that the skatter grass is built differently? I see that the grass is made-up out of loose grass blade components which are placed together and then converted to a proxy.
Maybe the small grass blades makes vray use way more ram, and therefore longer loading times.

On my next trial I will explode the skatter grass, and make a new vray proxy out of several grass blades together.

I hope my explanation is not to confusing.

5

Thank you both.

I wish there was a tutorial someplace on a workflow for making efficient proxies/components . Is there such a thing?